Wednesday, March 31, 2010

With a growing number of people turning to Kindles and other electronic readers, and with the Apple iPad arriving on Saturday, it is not always possible to see what others are reading or to project your own literary tastes.

A long time ago—less than a year ago in fact, but time goes all stretchy in the Twittersphere, just as it does in those folksongs in which the hero spends a night with the Queen of Faerie and then returns to find that a hundred years have passed and all his friends are dead…. Where was I?

People have always wanted philosophers to provide digestible wisdom, yet it is as true now as it was in Plato’s time that disciplined thinking is hard. So next time you sit next to a philosopher on a plane, talk about the movie, not the meaning of life.

In the rarefied world of ballet, where dancers are expected to speak with their bodies, sometimes it seems that aloofness is something to aspire to. Lately, though, the ribbons are loosening. Courtesy of Twitter, dancers are starting to make themselves heard. It isn’t always dainty.

Perhaps Nerriere was right. Things had changed. Was it not possible that, with the turn of the century, English language and culture were becoming decoupled from their contentious heritage, disassociated from post-colonial trauma? Was there a new cultural revolution at work: the emergence of English as a global communications phenomenon with a supra-national momentum that made it independent of its Anglo-American origins? You could almost express the idea in a formula: English + Microsoft = Globish.

Perhaps we can render an archaic term useful by recognizing a distinction between flight attendants and stewardesses. Flight attendants are airborne professionals charged with keeping passengers safe; stewardesses are unearthly beings. The former make sure that, buckled up, you are properly restrained; the latter, being creations of saucy marketing campaigns and creatures of sordid fantasies, are symbols of liberty teetering into libertinism.

With the renewed interest in nuclear weapons I have been struck by how few people there still are who have seen one explode. There are a few survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and there are a small number who witnessed some of the above ground test explosions. But the last American above-ground test was in 1962 and the last above-ground test by any country was conducted by the Chinese in 1980. This means that the Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis—to say nothing of the Iranians and North Koreans—have never seen a nuclear explosion. In the main, this is a very good thing: the fallout from such a test is a real health hazard. But there is a downside. We have lost the experience of watching a nuclear explosion—perhaps the most powerful lesson about nuclear bombs there is.

Americans, who expect to live in paradise, are always asking why they have been expelled from the happy garden. Lately the inquest has become urgent. David Thomson's new book on Psycho surveys the country's current moral squalor and blames its venality and violence on Hitchcock's sadistic film; now Gary Indiana returns to the same problem of disillusionment and despair, bemoans his image-crazed, commercially obsessed society, and fingers Andy Warhol as the joking demon who was responsible for its corruption.

Apparently book titles can't be copyrighted – I was going to call my first tome Confessions of an English Opium Eater, before my advisers counselled against it – which might explain why so many of them sound so familiar to me. Certainly, particular books of a particular genre always seem to have similar names.

Friday, March 19, 2010

One of the running jokes in On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s third novel, is that its main character is philosophically opposed to beauty. Howard Belsey is a professor of art history at Wellington College, and like all middle-aged professors in campus novels, he is a ludicrous figure--unfaithful to his wife, disrespected by his children, and, of course, unable to finish the book he has been talking about for years. In Howard’s case, the book is meant to be a demolition of Rembrandt, whose canvases he sees as key sites for the production of the Western ideology of beauty.

How new, then, is bloggery? Should we think of it as a by-product of the modern means of communication and a sign of a time when newspapers seem doomed to obsolescence? It makes the most of technical innovations—the possibility of constant contact with virtual communities by means of web sites and the premium placed on brevity by platforms such as Twitter with its limit of 140 characters per message. Yet blog-like messaging can be found in many times and places long before the Internet.

What have On Chesil Beach, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Don DeLillo's Point Omega got in common? Bewitching narratives concealing hidden depths? Check. Characters dealing with broken lives? Check. Authors performing at the peak of their prowess? Check. All read by me in a single week recently? Oh yes, check. How? Because they're all under 150 pages long.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

People have long been fascinated by the similarities between ants and human societies. Though there are no ant symphony orchestras, secret police, or schools of philosophy, both ants and men conduct wars, divide into specialized castes of workers, build cities, maintain infant nurseries and cemeteries, take slaves, practice agriculture, and indulge in occasional cannibalism, though ant societies are more energetic, altruistic, and efficient than human ones.

The mirroring makes us nervous: Are we not enough like ants or are we too much like them? Our ambivalence shows: being compared to an ant can be either a compliment or an insult.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Because seriously, if pancakes and sausage on a stick can last as long as they have (long enough to, if they were human, be a legal daycare provider of your children) how bad were the foods that failed?

The kitchen is a changed place in the wee hours, its clicks and hummings are louder, the pots and pans make a deafening clatter when I pull them out of the cupboard. But, as before, I am relaxed, my sense of smell is sharper. As I measure and weigh, I am more patient than during waking hours. I’ve always turned to flour and butter when I can’t sleep.

Of course, the growth of literary festivals is a well-documented phenomenon, with more than 60 listed on the British Council website and 100-plus over at LiteraryFestivals.co.uk. But the London Word festival doesn't call itself a literature, books or even readers' event. Instead, it aims to be a celebration of words and a test of their limits "in performance".

Out of a mathematical conceit the Italian writer Paolo Giordano has drawn a mesmerizing portrait of a young man and woman whose injured natures draw them together over the years and inevitably pull them apart.

Given California's storied history of pairing unusual ingredients with winning results—from its namesake California roll to Wolfgang Puck's smoked salmon pizza to the Korean short rib taco—perhaps it should have come as no surprise several years ago when, on a trip to LA, I spotted a sign above a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant advertising Chinese food and donuts.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

The choice of the poet to employ the objective personal pronoun — “us” — instead of the subjective — “we” — is the first of many (mis)appropriations that may sound funny to ears accustomed to standard English, but which signal a significant, deliberate shift away from contemporary idiom.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Some of the most extravagant of these visions of the future came not from cheap paperbacks, but from corporations buffing their high-tech credentials and recruiting engineering talent in the heady days when zooming budgets for defense and NASA had created a gold rush in outer space.

"My goal is to be like the guy who invented Velcro," marriage researcher John Gottman once told an interviewer. "Nobody remembers his name, but everybody uses Velcro." Gottman's own road to Velcro-level fame started with a 1998 article in the Journal of Marriage and the Family. He and his colleagues at the University of Washington had videotaped newlywed couples discussing a contentious topic for 15 minutes to measure precisely how they fought over it: Did they criticize? Were they defensive? Did either spouse curl his or her lip in contempt? Then, three to six years later, Gottman's team checked on the same couples' marital status and announced that based on the coding of the tapes, they could predict with 83 percent accuracy which ones were divorced.

The finest criticism renovates familiar texts, setting off little jolts of recognition. Ever since I first saw Psycho as a terrified adolescent, I've been replaying it – inside my head for several decades, nowadays on a screen at the foot of my bed – but David Thomson has spotted things in it that my countless viewings overlooked.

What do we say when we want to revisit a long-standing policy or scheme that no longer seems to be serving us or has ceased to produce useful results? We begin by saying tentatively, “Well, it’s not exactly written in stone.” (Sometimes this comes out as “not set in stone.”)

By that, people mean that it’s not one of the immutable Tablets of the Law. Thus, more recent fetishes such as the gold standard, or the supposedly holy laws of the free market, can be discarded as not being incised on granite or marble. But what if it is the original stone version that badly needs a re-write? Who will take up the revisionist chisel?

Since President Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama on February 18, the details of the closely-watched encounter have been carefully parsed, from the history of the room in which the two men met (the White House Map Room, an apparent indicator that a meeting is private, yet not personal) to the absence of the First Lady (making the meeting more official), and the serving of tea (making it less formal). Even the garbage bags that the Dalai Lama passed on his exit (seen as either incompetence by White House staff or a veiled message to Beijing) and the Dalai Lama’s flip-flops (seen as a metaphor for his policies or a rebuttal to Rupert Murdoch’s claim that the Tibetan leader wears Gucci shoes) were debated.

There is a photograph of Thomas Mann taken in Lübeck, Germany, in 1955, shortly before his death. He is standing with his wife, Katia, outside the family house, the house of Buddenbrooks, or what remained of it. He is staring straight at the camera; the expression on his face bears all the complexity of what has been lost and cannot be regained. It is the look of someone in full possession of dark knowledge, the eyes displaying a sense of resignation that is both hard and melancholy. Mann was in California during World War II; he was one of the most famous German exiles, having fled in 1933. Now he was merely visiting and he had no desire to return and stay, despite the fact that his heritage was in Germany and Germany was the home of his language. He had been away too long for these things to matter much. "Wherever I am, Germany is," he had said in America in 1938.

Going to the loo without a book! It is a profound shock. Instead of reading, I stare at the walls and notice that there are still two empty nails on which I meant – a year ago – to hang pictures. Also, I notice the dust on the floor and the cobwebs on the ceiling. I sense that I will be doing a lot more housework than usual this week.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Sweetened condensed milk is everywhere. There’s probably a can or two lurking in your cabinets. It is the key to Key lime pie; it brings the sweet to Vietnamese coffee; it went to Rio for Carnaval last month in the shape of brigadeiros, bite-size balls of milk fudge that are a Brazilian national treat.

But Victoria Belanger, a photographer also known as the Jello Mold Mistress of Brooklyn, may have a unique relationship with the stuff.

All of us lapse into such mistaken impressions of old age from time to time. It stems in part from an age-centered perspective, in which we view our own age as the most normal of times, the way all life should be. At 18 the 50-year-olds may seem ancient, but at 50 we are apt to say the same about the 80-year-olds.

As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.

The force is human culture, broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology.

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.

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